And yet, for all the analysis, the origins of Islamic
warfare remain remarkably under-examined. Major Western histories of political
Islam do cover such events as the Battle of Tours, the Crusades, and even the
Sunni-Shi’a schism and the Battle of Karbala (680 CE). But they often gloss
over much of the earlier period. In fact, reliable accounts in English of the
early years of Islam’s rapid growth – the three decades during which the faith
spread from a single town, Medina, to the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, the
Levant, Egypt, Libya, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia – are few.

For those seeking a better understanding of Islamist
warfare, this is unfortunate. The leaders and fighters of
the Islamic State are unlikely to be swayed by historiographical arguments. But
a glimpse into the military successes of the early caliphate suggests several
differences between competing notions of Islam and warfare that have taken root
across the Muslim world and in the West.

This is what makes Major General A.I. Akram’s book The Sword of
Allahsuch a valuable resource for its overarching military
history of the very early Islamic period (circa 613-642 CE). In the late 1960s,
Akram, a retired Pakistani military officer, was disappointed with the “void”
in Islamic military history in the curriculum of the Staff College at Quetta,
and took it upon himself to write a history of early Islamic military
successes. He chose as his vehicle the person of Khalid bin al-Waleed (known as
“the Sword of Allah”) because he was perhaps the most outstanding general among
the first generation of Mohammed’s followers.

Akram’s book is available in only a handful of U.S.
university libraries and it has not been reviewed in a U.S. publication since
the 1980s. But it has been used in military academies in his native Pakistan
and by other armed forces in the Islamic world. To some degree, its scarcity is
not unwarranted, for Akram was certainly no professional historian. He was unabashed
about presenting a viewpoint that was sympathetic and even generous to his
Islamic protagonists. And by his own admission in the introduction, he ignored
many early Western sources, particularly Byzantine historians writing in Greek,
a language he did not read.

Nonetheless, Akram rendered two incredibly valuable
services. Firstly, he mined the early Arabic literature from the seventh to the
tenth centuries, evaluated these texts critically when there were
discrepancies, and rendered an accessible and engaging narrative. Secondly, he
actually took the trouble to travel to most of the major battle sites – Uhud,
Aleppo, Yarmouk, Busra, Kazima – logging 4000 miles by road in a matter of
weeks in 1968 and 1969, from Kuwait and Syria, to Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi
Arabia. He used his first-hand knowledge of the geography of the battlegrounds
to critically examine some of the early accounts. As with most ancient and
medieval historical texts, many of the early Muslim chronicles were written at
some temporal and geographical distance from the events they described, and
were thus inaccurate, misleading, or contradictory, particularly on matters of
geography.